59 Love Quotes from Books for Every Romantic

Last Updated: January 23, 2017

By
Erica Daniels

Do you get a little panicky when it comes time to write your Valentine a card? Words don’t come easy for all of us, especially when it comes to matters of the heart. The most famous writers even say the feeling of love can be indescribable. If Ernest Hemingway and Jane Austen have a hard time finding the perfect words to explain love, you deserve a little help. Use the filters below to pick the level of emotion fitting for your sweatheart.

If your partner fantasizes about Nicholas Sparks’ movies coming to life, pick “Hopeless Romantic” (and order a dozen red roses for Valentine’s Day). On the other hand, some ladies prefer dry wit and a little sarcasm — if that’s the case, “Cynic” is the option for you.

Which describes the recipient?

“Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end.”

Corinne

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël

“Who, being loved, is poor?”

A Woman of No Importance

Oscar Wilde

“I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.”

Great Expectations

Charles Dickens

“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”

Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy

“Whatever our souls are made out of, his and mine are the same...If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.”

Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë

“Anyone who has seen her smile has known perfection. She instills grace in every common thing and divinity in every careless gesture.”

“The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all round him. She had become a physical necessity.”

1984

George Orwell

“To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further.”

Les Misérables

Victor Hugo

“I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Pable Neruda

“It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.”

Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov

“I choose him over and over again, and he chooses me.”

Allegiant

Veronic Roth

“Each time you happen to me all over again.”

The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton

“I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world...”

Having a Coke with You

Frank O’Hara

“Why, darling, I don’t live at all when I’m not with you.”

A Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemingway

“You could have had anything else in the world, and you asked for me.”

City of Glass

Cassandra Clare

“For the two of us, home isn’t a place. It is a person. And we are finally home.”

Anna and the French Kiss

Stephanie Perkins

“What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody.”

Choke

Chuck Palahniuk

“She was more than human to me. She was a Fairy, a Sylph, I don’t know what she was – anything that no one ever saw, and everything that everybody ever wanted. I was swallowed up in an abyss of love in an instant.”

David Copperfield

Charles Dickens

“The way her body existed only where he touched her. The rest of her was smoke.”

The God of Small Things

Arundhati Roy

“To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company.”

Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë

“If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.”

Emma

Jane Austen

“He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.”

Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy

“You are the friend to whom my soul is attached as to its better half. You are dearer to me than language has the power of telling.”

Evelina

Frances Burney

“If you remember me, then I don’t care if everyone else forgets.”

Kafka on the Shore

Haruki Murakami

“I am nothing special, of this I am sure. I am a common man with common thoughts and I’ve led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I’ve loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough.”

The Notebook

Nicholas Sparks

“When I saw you I fell in love, and you smiled because you knew.”

Falstaff

Giuseppe Verdie

“In case you ever foolishly forget: I am never not thinking of you.”

Selected Diaries

Virginia Woolf

“There is never a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment.”

The Truth About Forever

Sarah Dessen

“You don’t love because, you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.”

The Sound and The Fury

William Faulkner

“Doubt thou the stars are fire; Doubt that the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt I love.”

Hamlet

William Shakespeare

“As I got to know you, I began to realise that beauty was the least of your qualities. I became fascinated by your goodness. I was drawn in by it. I didn’t understand what was happening to me. And it was only when I began to feel actual, physical pain every time you left the room that it finally dawned on me: I was in love, for the first time in my life.”

Dangerous Liaisons

Choderlos de Laclos

“I know from experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”

A Room with a View

E.M. Forster

“If it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.”

Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy

If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you.”

Winnie-the-Pooh

A.A. Milne

“It has made me better loving you ... it has made me wiser, and easier, and brighter.”

The Portrait of a&nsp;Lady

Henry James

“Love, having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface.”

Other Voices, Other Rooms

Truman Capote

“Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge. That’s what it is: an edge, a razor. It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away on either side.”

Delirium

Lauren Oliver

“I was beginning to believe that a very few times in your life, if you were lucky, you might meet someone who was exactly right for you. Not because he was perfect, or because you were, but because your combined flaws were arranged in a way that allowed two separate beings to hinge together.”

Blue-Eyed Devil

Lisa Kleypas

“I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am tonight.”

Tender is the Night

F. Scott Fitzgerald

“You don’t love someone because they’re perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they’re not.”

My Sister’s Keeper

Jodi Picoult

“You can find something truly important in an ordinary minute.”

For One More Day

Mitch Albom

“I like myself better when I’m with you.”

Tuesdays with Morrie

Mitch Albom

“Love lets you find those hidden places in another person, even the ones they didn’t know were there, even the ones they wouldn’t have thought to call beautiful themselves.”

Wild Awake

Hilary T. Smith

“This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.”

Half of a Yellow Sun

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“I love you more than I hate everyone else.”

Landline

Rainbow Rowel

“You know, when it works, love is pretty amazing. It’s not overrated. There’s a reason for all those songs.”

This Lullaby

Sarah Dessen

“Welcome to the wonderful world of jealousy, he thought. For the price of admission, you get a splitting headache, a nearly irresistable urge to commit murder, and an inferiority complex.”

Dark Lover

J.R. Ward

“And then I did laugh, even though the future was a dangerous place, because I loved her, and she loved me, and the world was beautiful.”

Forever

Maggie Stiefvater

“There I was, way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby

Use the inspiration from some of the most famous poets, playwrights and authors to help you write out the perfect Valentine’s Day card. Don’t forget to get a gift to accompany your sentiment! Check out our selection and send the perfect bouquet.